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Tips From a Backyard on a Dirt Road

Margaret Roach, the garden writer and blogger who lived out the fantasy of not only making it to the top (editorial director of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia), but also chucking it for an old house in upstate New York, wrote about her first adventures with snakes and solitude in “And I Shall Have Some Peace There: Trading in the Fast Lane for My Own Dirt Road.” Now, in “The Backyard Parables: Lessons on Gardening, and Life” (Grand Central Publishing, $26), she really digs in. Along with observations of wind, caterpillars and bacteria — Mycobacterium vaccae can elevate the mood and stimulate immune cells — she offers details like shoveling alone, through thigh-high snow, in the dark of night, to hammer a hole in the ice of a frog pond so the frogs didn’t suffocate. For fans who crave her gardening advice, don’t worry. She tells how to protect banana plants in winter, and put up a deer fence, too.

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Patricia Wall/The New York Times

A version of this article appears in print on January 17, 2013, on Page D3 of the New York edition with the headline: Tips From a Backyard on a Dirt Road. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe